A couple of good points about the developments on the book market. Publishers, Matthew Yglesias maintains in his article, will be crushed by Amazon et al. because they don’t really contribute anything of value. “When all is said and done, the argument between Amazon and book publishers is over the rather banal question of price. Amazon’s view is that since “printing” an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should be really cheap. Publishers’ view is that since “printing” an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should offer enormous profit margins to book publishers. If you care about reading or ideas or literature, the choice between these visions is not a difficult one. The publishing incumbents have managed to get some intellectuals sufficiently tangled-up to believe that it is. But ask yourself this — do you regret the invention of the printing press? Of the paperback? Do you think public libraries devalue books and reading? The idea is absurd.”

“Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise.“ Reading about this disaster challenges your concept of how slow molasses really is.

“In fact, you could say that ‘Arctic Summer’ is the first great flowering of the post-Moffatt Forster, an image of the novelist that wouldn’t have been nearly as credible a decade ago. What better homage can a novelist pay to a biographer than that?” Very interesting review of Galgut’s novel – with an emphasis on Forster.